Full Installation

A Full Installation installs Puppy onto the hard drive like any other "normal" Linux. This kind of installation is a good idea if you have less than 256 MB of memory.

Start "Menu | Setup | Puppy universal installer". Select the medium that you want to install Puppy to. I chose the internal hard drive for this example.

If you have more than one hard drive, choose one.

Click the button next to the partition that you want to install Puppy to.

Confirm the next dialogue by clicking "OK".

You now have to decide whether you want a "Frugal" or a "Full" installation. Since this chapter describes a Full installation, click the button labelled "FULL".

The files will be copied from the CD to the hard drive.

Since you now have two operating systems on your computer (Windows and Puppy Linux), you need a boot loader. The boot loader is the first program executed after switching the computer on. It enables you to specify which operating system should be started up. If Windows was the only operating system on your computer up to now, you do not have a boot loader. The Puppy Installer can install GRUB as a boot loader for you. To do this, click on "INSTALL GRUB".

Confirm the next dialogue by clicking "OK".

Select "simple installation" and click "OK".

In the next dialogue box, select "standard" and click "OK".

Now you have to specify where the GRUB boot loader should store its files. These can only be written to a Linux file system partition. Thus, please type "/dev/hda2" - that is, the same partition to which Puppy has just been installed.

Now you have to specify where the GRUB boot loader itself should be installed to. Select the Master Boot Record "MBR" and click "OK".

Confirm the next dialogue by clicking "OK".

Confirm the next dialogue by clicking "OK".

In the next dialogue box, click the "No" button.

The installation is complete. What remains to be done is to configure the GRUB boot loader so that Puppy Linux can be booted. This is how to do it:

Open the file "menu.lst". You will find this file in the /boot/grub directory of the partition you installed the GRUB files to (/dev/hda2 in our example). For Linux newbies, I include detailed instructions on how to find and open this file. More advanced users can skip ahead to where menu.lst gets edited.

Start "Menu | Filesystem | Pmount mount/unmount drives" and click on the red hard disk symbol next to "/dev/hda2".

The symbol changes colour from red to green.

Start "Menu | Filesystem | ROX-Filer file filemanager".

Click with the right mouse button and choose "Window | Enter Path" from the context menu.

Type this into the box labelled "Goto" (do not omit the slash at the end): /mnt/hda2/boot/grub/

You are now inside the /mnt/hda2/boot/grub/ folder.

Use the right mouse button to click on the file called "menu.lst".

From the context menu that pops up, select "File menu.lst | Open As Text".

You can now see the contents of the menu.lst file.

"Comment out", i.e. put a number sign (#) before each of the following lines:

All necessary changes have been made. The file should now look like this:

Save the file by selecting "File | Save" from the program's menu. Exit the text editor.

Close the ROX file manager.

Click on the green hard drive symbol next to /dev/hda2. It should then change colour from green to red.

Click on the green CD-ROM symbol next to /dev/hdc. Remove the Puppy CD.

Exit Puppy and reboot the computer: "Menu | Shutdown | Reboot computer".

When you reboot the computer, you will be asked whether you want to save the "session" (i.e., all the configuration changes you made). Select "DO NOT SAVE" with the cursor keys and hit Return.

Your computer will now shut down completely and then start up again. You will then see the boot loader come up. Select "Puppy Linux (on /dev/hda2)" with the cursor keys and press Return. Puppy boots up. At the first bootup, you will once again have to specify your country and your screen resolution. This configuration is saved so that you do not have to repeat this process at the next bootup.